This disclosure relates generally to the field of wireless sensor networks and, more specifically, to a multi-service adaptable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks.
Recent convergences of technological and application trends have resulted in an exceptional level of interest in wireless ad-hoc networks and in particular in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The push was provided by rapid progress in computation and communication technology as well as the emerging field of low cost, reliable, MEMS-based sensors. The pull was provided by numerous applications that can be summarized under the umbrella of computational worlds, where the physical world can be observed and influenced through the Internet and WSN infrastructures. Consequently, there have been a number of vigorous research and development efforts at all levels of development and usage of WSNs, including applications, operating systems, architectures, middleware, integrated circuits, and systems.
Typically, WSNs contain hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes that have the ability to communicate among themselves and also to an external base station (BS). While the sensor nodes have limited sensing region, processing power and energy, networking a large number of such nodes gives rise to a robust, reliable and accurate sensor network covering a wider region. Since the sensor nodes are energy-constrained, a typical deployment of a WSN poses many challenges and necessitates energy-awareness at all layers of the networking protocol stack.
For example, at the network layer, it is highly desirable to find methods for energy-efficient route discovery and relaying of data from the sensor nodes to the BS such that the lifetime of the network is maximized. Design of an efficient routing protocol is a particularly challenging task due to some of the characteristic features of such networks. Firstly, sensor nodes are tightly constrained in terms of energy, processing, and storage capacities and a routing protocol should minimize the resource consumption. Secondly, in contrast to other wireless networks, applications in WSNs require flow of sensed data from multiple sensor nodes (sources) to a particular BS (sink), therefore generating a new kind of traffic. Finally, data collected by many sensors in WSNs is typically based on common phenomena, so there is a high probability that this data has some redundancy. Such redundancy needs to be exploited by the routing protocols to improve energy and bandwidth utilization.
Example WSN routing protocols types includes multipath-based, query-based, negotiation-based, and quality-of-service (QoS)-based depending on the application of the protocol. Some industrial examples where the proposed algorithms may be used are outlined below.